


pull the rider down

by TheBigCat



Category: Bernice Summerfield (Books & Audio)
Genre: Angst, Assassination Attempt(s), Epic Friendships, Fluff, Gen, Legion-Era, Team as Family, Yuletide 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 01:08:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21788896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBigCat/pseuds/TheBigCat
Summary: There's an assassin in Legion City, and they're out for Irving's blood. This is a problem, in more ways than one.
Relationships: Irving Braxiatel & Bernice Summerfield, Irving Braxiatel & Legion Ensemble Cast
Comments: 18
Kudos: 33
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vienna_salvatori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vienna_salvatori/gifts).



> Happy first fic exchange, and happy Yuletide!! Good to have you with us. Clearly, I ended up going a bit overboard for this, but family dynamics and adventure are always fun to write for, so - I very much hope you enjoy!
> 
> Thanks to elijah_was_a_prophet for the beta work!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Listen, if you can’t throw a party at eleven thirty PM for no other good reason than ‘we’re alive to throw it’, when _can_ you throw a party?”

It all begins with an advertisement, an after-hours bar party, an assassin, and an archaeologist – although not necessarily all at the same time, and certainly not in that order. For a reasonably thrilling and dramatic rendition of the events that unfolded on Legion (during what would be dubbed ‘late February’ if anybody tracking the date were doing so in Earth months), the most appropriate place to begin would be in the main room of the White Rabbit, where five remarkable individuals are gathered. The windows are shuttered, the doors are locked, the lights are dim, and the alcohol, for a very limited time, is free – and the bar’s proprietor isn’t even complaining about it, which is a rare occurrence indeed. Despite the relatively small nature of the gathering, the sound of laughter and talk is bright in the air, and the mood is infectiously cheerful. Everybody’s having an absolutely marvellous time, which is a rare thing when it comes to gatherings taking place on Legion.

Behind the bar, a tall man with pointed ears and strange legs and (most tellingly) bright red eyes that seem to glitter and glow oddly when they catch the light is pouring out drinks, mixing them up with the confidence of someone who’s been doing it for entirely too long, and the skill of someone who, despite having done it for entirely too long, hasn’t quite worked out how to do it properly yet. His name is Jack – Jack McSpringheel, to give him his full and correct name, although you might say (and he might well agree with you) that it’s more than a little pretentious.

“A drink for the lady!” he calls out as he sloshes a generous amount of dangerous-looking blue liquid into a glass full with all sorts and shades of other fascinating liquids already. He presents it across the bar with a sharp-edged grin to the dark-skinned woman sitting on the other side. She accepts it with a raised eyebrow and an amused twitch of her lips.

“Lady, am I?” she says. Her hair curls around her face like a flock of inquisitive question marks, and although she’s leaned casually against the bar in what can be accurately described as a lazy slouch, there’s something unmistakably regal about her. It’s definitely not her loose t-shirt and jeans – certainly not the way that she’s poking her tongue out at Jack childishly. It could be the face. It’s probably the face. Her name’s Ruth – no last name to speak of, really.

“Only the finest for our Ruth,” says Jack, and then laughs uproariously as she glares at him and attempts to down the drink in one gulp – only to end up spilling half of it down her shirt in a most unladylike manner.

“This night is going great already,” she mutters, although she’s smiling a bit as well. She grabs a wad of paper napkins from the side of the bar, and starts blotting at her shirt, trying to salvage it. “Keep those drinks coming, Jack.”

Jack salutes in her direction, and spins back to the rows of bottles behind the counter, humming to himself and running a long finger over the labels.

“Okay, but I still don’t understand what this is all for,” says a peculiar-looking sort of man who’s sitting on the counter nearby, sipping at his own drink occasionally. He seems human enough until you get to the face, whereupon a casual observer would start to think things like, ‘ _ huh, dog _ ’, or, if you were slightly more astute and a bit less casually racist, ‘ _ huh, Killoran’ _ . Peter Summerfield is his name and while adventure might not strictly be his game, security and defence certainly is. The whole half-Killoran thing isn’t strictly related to this, but it definitely doesn’t hurt. “It’s nice to have a party, but – there’s not much of an occasion for it, is there? It’s nobody’s birthday –”

“That you know of,” Jack cuts in. “It could be my birthday, for all you know!”

“Is it?” Ruth asks, looking genuinely stricken at the very thought of having missed the occasion.

“...well, no,” he says. Frowns. “There  _ is  _ no reason for this, is there?”

“Do we honestly need an excuse to throw a party?” says the dark-haired woman at one of the tables nearby, feet up on it and leaning back dangerously in her chair. “Good grief. What a miserable excuse for a family I’ve ended up with. Listen, if you can’t throw a party at eleven thirty PM for no other good reason than ‘we’re alive to throw it’, when  _ can  _ you throw a party?”

Needless to say, this exceptionally classy and clever woman is Professor Bernice Surprise Summerfield – Benny to her friends, ‘wait, how did she even end up finding us _ again _ ’ to her enemies (or some other variations thereupon).

“Well, we _ have _ survived nearly six months on Legion together successfully and fruitfully,” says the final member of this small gathering. He’s currently over in the corner of the bar, painstakingly shifting crates and boxes off of a covered-up surface that’s more or less buried in them. He doesn’t look as if he’s enjoying the process very much at all, but nobody else there has volunteered to help him. His name (although he’s trying his very best not to spread it around at this current point in time, for matters of personal safety) is Irving Braxiatel. He is currently thinking about how strangely fond he’s become of everyone gathered here tonight, and also about how much fonder he would be if they’d stop drinking and lend him a hand – especially considering that this was their idea in the first place. “Barring minor misdemeanours, of course.”

“You call the Fenman incident  _ minor? _ ” Benny exclaims.

“Or me being possessed by the spirit of Dorian fucking Grey?” Jack cries out from the bar.

“Jack, you weren’t possessed by him, don’t be so dramatic,” Ruth starts.

“Remember how Mum and Ruth arrived and the literal next day there was an unidentified craft threatening to break the city dome and destroy the lives of everyone here?” Peter says. “If that’s considered  _ minor  _ then we’re living even stranger lives than I thought we were.”

“Well, I did get mugged at gunpoint a few months ago,” Ruth says thoughtfully. “That was kind of an incident too, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t believe that counts,” says Irving, pausing and regarding a particularly hefty-looking box like it’s personally wronged him somehow. “You did end up breaking most of his ribs and fracturing his arm in two places before Peter managed to catch up with you.”

“...I mean, fair enough.”

“The point being,” says Benny, brandishing her glass of whiskey somewhat drunkenly, “despite all these – you know, weird shenanigans that the universe seems to love throwing at us – ”

“Mostly you, though,” points out Jack.

“ – at  _ all of us, _ we’re still here and we’re closer than ever.”

“Hear, hear,” says Ruth, raising her glass crookedly.

“Speak for yourself,” Jack says from the counter.

Benny pulls a face at him. “Shut up, Jack, and accept my love,” she says, pointing right at him.

He clasps a hand dramatically to his chest, and his face twists, an exaggerated parody of horror. “Oh, gods above! She’s broken out the L-word! How utterly  _ revolting –  _ Benny, how could you?!”

“Easily! And I’ll say it again!” Benny bounds to her feet, takes a few quick strides towards the bar. “I love you, Jack! You and your ridiculous bouncy legs and your stupid sarcasm and inability to take things seriously – you  _ care  _ even though you say you don’t and that makes you endlessly endearing.”

Jack looks horrified. “No! Stop! You’re ruining my reputation!”

“Love ya,” she says with a smug grin, cocking a finger gun in his direction.

He cries out like he’s actually been shot, and falls to the ground in a flurry of long limbs and half-tied-on apron, much to Ruth’s amusement. “ _ No!  _ Oh my god, she’s ended me – get out while you still can, everybody! Save yourselves!”

Benny, relentless, turns her finger gun onto Ruth. “ _ You. _ ”

“Me!” she echoes, bringing up a hand to ward her off.

“You beautiful wonderful creature, you absolutely light up my life and I’m  _ so  _ glad we met!” she shoots off, dealing an imaginary bullet right to Ruth’s chest.

Ruth plays along, falling right off her chair and to the ground with an appropriately horrified look on her face and a truly heart wrenching shriek of despair. She hits the floor at an awkward angle and yelps.

“You all right?” Benny asks, lowering her finger gun.

“I’m good!” she says, getting to her feet, and then, “oh, this floor is disgusting –  _ urgh. _ ”

“That’s what you get for trying to run away from my affection,” Benny says unashamedly. She turns around, glancing around the rest of the bar.

“Oh no,” Peter says, realizing he’s next.

He actually makes a decent attempt at getting away – bounds to his feet, makes for the stairs – but Benny manages to corner him, blocking him off from ever getting there. “My son, my son, my only son –” She swoops down on him, ruffles his hair as he complains and tries to bat her away. “You’ve got so big and handsome and you’re so clever, too – just look at you, running this whole city by yourself!”

“ _ Mum – _ ”

“Mwah!” She plants a huge, exaggerated kiss on his head.

“I should have left Legion when I had the chance,” he growls.

“Mwah, mwah,  _ mwah! _ ” She smooches his head even more, ruffling his curls and messing up his ears. He pushes her away, not ungently. He’ll probably deny it to the end of his natural life, but he  _ is  _ smiling. Just a bit, but it’s definitely there.

“And you – ” A few more steps, and Benny comes to a halt in front of Irving. Her finger points at his head, right in-between his eyes.

“Me?” he says with a little upwards quirk of his mouth, a hand on the final remaining box. He meets her gaze, refusing to go cross-eyed to look at her finger.

She looks him up and down with a discerning eye, looking oddly serious for a moment or two. She puts one hand on her hips and frowns at him, and then grins, lowering her finger. “Mm, you’re pretty great too. All things considered.”

His eyes crinkle up at the corners as he smiles back down at her. “High praise indeed. Thank you, Benny.”

She bounces up to peck him quickly on the cheek, and then hops backwards two paces. “Done yet?” she asks.

“No thanks to the rest of you,” he says, and it’s hardly even very grumpy at all. He sweeps up the final box, deposits it on a nearby table, and turns back to the large, dusty-looking sheet that’s covering up what all the boxes were resting on. He wriggles his fingers in the air, and grasps the edge of the sheet. With one swift, sharp movement, he tugs it away with a magician’s flair, sending dust every which way.

Benny coughs and sneezes and fans at the air as Irving sets the sheet to one side, and opens the lid of the old brown upright piano that’s been revealed. It’s an archaic sort of instrument – made of wood, its keys chipped and dirtied, and probably not even a genuine Earth artefact judging by the modern-looking imprint just above the music stand – but there’s something pleasing about its simplicity nonetheless.

Irving takes a seat at the rickety piano stool that accompanies it, and glides a hand over the keys. The notes have a tinny, slightly out-of-tune sound to them, and they probably haven’t seen maintenance for many years, but they’re passably in tune. He spreads his fingers out, and plays the disconnected notes of a simple arpeggio. “Good enough, I suppose,” he says grudgingly.

Benny nudges him with her elbow. “Beggars can’t be choosers, Mr Only-The-Best. I’d bet the entire day’s register on this being the only piano within at least a full light year’s radius of Legion.”

“That’s not a very weighty bet,” Irving says. “You know full well that there’s, well, absolutely bugger-all in there.”

She laughs and leans against the side of the piano like the femme fatale in an old-Earth spy movie, and the others come to gather around the piano as Irving plucks abstractly at the keys, frowning to himself.

“How long have we had this here?” Jack wonders, running a curious fingernail along the wood of the piano.

“The previous owners left it here, if you’d believe it,” Irving says. “It hasn’t got very much use since we opened – a shame, really. All good bars need a rickety old player piano in the corner, to add to the ambience.”

“But this isn’t a good bar,” Benny points out.

“Also, that’s not a player piano,” Peter says.

“Oh, details!” Irving plays a loud set of dramatic chords, causing everyone except Peter to jump, and gestures grandly. “Now, what first?”

They muddle their way through a couple of not-at-all-seasonally-appropriate Advent songs, since those are the ones that all of them are at least somewhat familiar with, and then it becomes a bit of a challenge to find common musical ground between the five of them – a more difficult task than you’d imagine, taking into consideration how different their respective backgrounds are. But they manage. Jack knows a lot of thoroughly raunchy and truly scandalous drinking songs that only require a very basic, easy-to-pick-up accompaniment, and ends up regaling everyone with them until Benny’s laughing her head off and Ruth’s cheeks are dark with embarrassment (although she’s laughing too) and Irving just flat-out refuses to play any more.

Peter isn’t big on singing solo and music in general, so – when asked – he just shrugs it off and says that any songs he knows are either far too childish or ones they wouldn’t be familiar with. And he passes it over to Ruth – and, for some reason, Ruth has a quite detailed knowledge of quite a few old Earth folk songs (“Probably from one of the reboots?” she suggests. “You know, I’m not really sure.”), a knowledge which Irving actually shares, much to their delighted surprise.

The two of them piece together a passable rendition of Tam Lin. Ruth isn’t the world’s greatest singer – she can’t hit notes accurately one hundred percent of the time, and she’s rather uncertain about the ones that she does end up hitting – but there’s something rather charming about it nonetheless, especially with Irving’s somewhat improvised harmony and piano laid underneath it. When they’re done, Benny ruffles her hair and pronounces her Legion’s Queen of Earth Folk Songs, a title which Ruth accepts with awkward grace.

“I mean, it’s not like there’s much contest for that,” she says.

“Am I a joke to you?” Irving says, deadpan, from the piano stool.

Peter, at this point, perks up with sudden remembrance, and says  _ something something Bohemian Rhapsody,  _ to which Irving, Benny and Jack all immediately brighten and exclaim in delight, while Ruth looks confused and says, “sorry – Bohemian what now?”

Which means, of course, that they immediately have to demonstrate to her exactly what Bohemian Rhapsody (the only Queen song to have survived six centuries and several galaxies and have remained an absolute classic) is, with the unhinged enthusiasm and passion that the song deserves. Irving ends up taking the high parts and Benny, Jack and Peter the low parts, which is both immensely inefficient and absolutely hilarious to listen to.

“That explained absolutely nothing, thanks,” says Ruth, when they’re done. “I liked the bit about the silhouette, though?”

“Oh, yeah – everyone does,” Jack says.

There’s a bit of a lull in the energy as everyone recovers from the gruelling vocal experience that is Bohemian Rhapsody, and then Irving straightens up. He raises an eyebrow at Benny, and his lips curve upwards in a smile, and he maintains direct eye contact as he begins to play a set of dark, strong chords in a minor key. After a moment or two, she starts glaring at him.

“Oh,  _ come on _ ,” she says. “How did you even find out about that damn thing?”

He keeps on playing the opening chords in a loop. “It’s not exactly easy to miss it, Bernice.” He grins at her. “Oh, do go on. I believe you’re intimately familiar with the words.”

“No! Stop it!” She swats angrily at his shoulder. He dodges, and keeps on playing the opening chords at her, rather insistently. “Seriously, stop it. It’s my greatest shame. I don’t want to hear this.”

“Surely not your  _ greatest. _ ”

“You’re right. My greatest shame was ever deciding to stay on Legion with you. You’re a terror and a menace.”

“Oh, is  _ this  _ that famous song of yours?” Jack says. “You know, I think I want to hear it too! Benny? Care to grace us with your glorious voice?”

“ _ No. _ ”

“Oh, come on!” Ruth says. Her eyes go wide, pleading. “You have a really nice voice, Benny – you don’t sing often enough.”

“I  _ will  _ sing,” Benny huffs. “I have been singing! All this time! Just anything but this!”

“But I want to hear  _ this _ song!” Ruth begs, and winks conspiratorially at Irving, who beams back at her.

“I saw that wink! You’re not as covert as you think you are!”

“Sing the song, Mum,” says Peter, who’s probably only saying it in order to exact embarrassing but non-permanent revenge upon his mother. “For me? You know, your big, handsome son who you love a lot?”

“You’re all terrible!” Benny says, a far cry from her earlier words of praise.

“You say the sweetest things,” Jack purrs with a frankly diabolic grin on his face. “ _ Sing the song,  _ Benny. You wouldn’t want to disappoint your loyal, loving family, would you?”

She makes a strangled noise, and then flings her hands up in complete exasperation. “ _ I hate all of you,”  _ she moans. “Fine! You asked for this!”

There is scattered cheering and whooping. Irving very kindly stops playing the opening chords for a moment to give her a chance to collect herself, and then – when she gives him a reluctant nod, he dives right into it once more, fingers flashing across the keys in a far jazzier rendition of the song than it was originally composed.

Benny takes a deep breath, grimaces, then begins to sing in a remarkably clear voice: “ _ I’m looking for something –  _ ”

Peter’s communicator goes off. He curses under his breath, and goes to silence it – but then he catches sight of what’s being displayed on the screen in flashing red text, and he goes still and silent – eyes widening, lips pressing tightly together.

“We have a problem,” he says, over the sound of his mother’s initially-reluctant-but-quickly-getting-into-it singing – and then, when she doesn’t stop, “ _ we have a problem. _ ”

Irving stops, and so does Benny.

“Aww,  _ come on, _ ” Jack complains, lowering the recording device he had pulled out to film the experience. “She was just getting to the good part –”

“No, no, let him speak,” says a relieved-looking Benny, who hadn’t started to sing the ‘ _ adventure is my name’  _ part yet and doesn’t particularly want to, especially not while being filmed in excruciating detail. Despite that, she’s got a good-natured sort of bright energy to her. But the moment she catches sight of the look on her son’s face, that brightness fades. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Irving swings his legs elegantly over the side of the piano stool, and comes up to read over Peter’s shoulder. His expression darkens as his eyes scan the short message, and then he sighs, taking two steps backwards so he can sit on one of the nearby bar tables – an undignified move that he normally never would have dreamed of doing. He rubs at the bridge of his nose, looking vexed. “This certainly complicates matters,” he says.

“No kidding,” Peter agrees. By this point, he’s removed his communicator so the other three occupants of the bar can properly read off the screen – which they’re in the process of doing, in record time.

Jack is the first to look up. All traces of joking are gone from his face and demeanour, but there’s still a certain amount of incredulity to his voice when he says, “Irving, this is a call for your immediate execution. Somebody’s actually gone and put a price on your head.”

“A quite extravagant price, as it turns out,” Irving says, rather glumly. “I don’t know if I should be flattered or hysterical.”

“Settle for flattered,” Benny suggests. “Save the screaming hysterics for after we sort this whole mess out, yeah?”

“ _ Is  _ this the sort of thing we can sort out?” Ruth asks, looking up from the communicator screen. She’s bunching the fabric of her shirt up tightly with one hand, twisting it back and forth. “I mean – somebody wants you dead. And they’re willing to pay that much to make it happen – even if we stop  _ one  _ assassin or whatever, they’re just going to send more and more.”

“Well, to be fair, quite a lot of people want me dead,” Irving says. “Or – to be precise – they want  _ Irving Braxiatel  _ dead, and never mind if the Irving Braxiatel they’re looking for isn’t actually me. I can hardly blame them for wanting my alternate self dead. I rather feel like killing him myself some days.”

“There’s a chance they might go for the other you instead,” Jack points out. “That would work out well for all of us, come to think of it.”

“Good luck with  _ that _ ,” Benny says with a snort. “He’s a hardy bastard to take down. Trust me, I have experience in that area.”

Peter shakes his head. “The only reason I got this alert is because it’s in close enough distance of Legion to be a genuine threat. Unless there’s some other Braxes in range that I don’t know about –”

“Always a possibility,” Jack says.

“ – we have to be prepared for the worst.”

“Well, at least nobody’s picked up the job yet,” Ruth says optimistically. “That gives us time to prepare!”

“Nice thought, but that’s not the case,” Peter says flatly. He picks up his communicator again, and scrolls all the way to the bottom of the page, pointing. “There. Picked up two days and three hours ago by someone referring to themselves as ‘Mirage’? There aren’t any further details, but – ”

“Mirage?” Jack says, frowning.

Peter looks up. “Yeah. Do you know them?”

“No, I was just thinking about how needlessly edgy that is. I mean,  _ Mirage?  _ Really? Shouldn’t a good assassin or contract killer or whatever try to stay anonymous, to preserve the element of surprise? That’s just sloppy work. Also –”

“Wait,” says Benny, cutting across his rising tirade. “Jack might not know them, but I think I might; I’ve definitely heard that name before. Can you run a search for them or something? There’s got to be an archive of well-known contract killers.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Peter says, fingers flying across the keypad. “Already on it.”

Benny comes to sit next to Irving – not quite close enough for their elbows to bump, but close enough to be a reassuring, if somewhat tense, presence. He looks over at her and gives her the tightest of smiles. Ruth takes up a position on his other side, and draws her legs up to her chest, lips pressed tightly together.

Jack hovers near Peter, muttering advice and unhelpful comments until Peter summarily snaps at him and tells him to stay in his own lane and  _ to just go and do something else for now, okay?  _ And it’s a testament to just how far the mood has fallen that instead of arguing or picking a fight with his usual gleeful abandon, Jack just nods, and goes over to join the others – sitting on the desk with his back to Irving, as if to complete a protective triangle around him that, in all honesty, probably wouldn’t end up doing much protecting if a real threat occurred. But it’s the thought that counts, and they all just wait there in silence until Peter looks up at Irving with a look all over his face that quite plainly says he’s found the answer he had been looking for. “Well, good news and bad news.”

“Good news first, please,” Irving says.

“The good news is that your death warrant seems to have been picked up by the most feared and skilled assassin in the entire galaxy,” says Peter.

“How is that good news?”

“...you’re probably going to die quickly.”

Irving’s head is more or less in his hands at this point, his fingers rubbing almost spasmodically over the bridge of his nose in a desperate attempt to calm himself. “I almost dread to ask this, but... the bad news?”

Peter’s expression is grim. “They’re a shapeshifter.”

“Oh, of course they are,” Irving says, voice dripping with gravitas. “Because this day – no, my entire  _ existence _ – couldn’t get any better. Brilliant. Utterly  _ fabulous. _ ”

Benny releases a sigh that’s almost too big for her body. “Oh no. I thought so, but – ”

“Sorry,  _ shapeshifter _ ?” Ruth says. “And you said they picked up the job two days ago? They could already be here, on Legion. And they could be  _ anyone _ .”

Jack turns around to look at them, suspicion in his eyes. “They could,” he says, “be in this room, right now, with us.”

There’s a horrified short silence where everybody does their best to try to look as if they’re not carefully scrutinizing each other for the slightest sign that they’re not who they say they are.

“We’d know, though,” Benny says. “Wouldn’t we?”

“Well, let’s break this down, why don’t we?” Jack says, and raises two fingers. “Ruth dumped half her drink down her front earlier, when she’s usually the  _ pinnacle  _ of grace and fluidity. That might be a point against her, or it might just be her having an off-day. Benny’s been giving out a lot more compliments than usual. Shapeshifter, or just a hitherto-unseen drunken affectation? Who can say?” He whirls around, jabs a finger at Peter. “You didn’t try to shoot your mother in the stomach when she ruffled your hair! That’s either character development or a  _ veeeery  _ suspicious sign. And Irving – did any of us actually know that you could play the piano before tonight? Is that a recently acquired skill? A  _ very  _ recently acquired skill?”

“Jack,” says Irving. “Really now – there’s no reason why a shapeshifter would have replaced me. I’m the exact person that they’re trying to kill, remember?”

“That’s exactly what a shapeshifter  _ would  _ say, to throw us off the scent!” Jack snaps back at him.

“Jack,” says Ruth. “Seriously, you’re scaring me a bit.”

“All I’m saying is, there’s literally no way of knowing! Any of us could be a shapeshifter already, and none of the rest of us would know it!” Jack’s fingernails are actually digging into the wood of the table he’s sitting on now, gouging deep marks into the bad paint job. “I’d suggest locking Irving in a room until all of this is over, but there’s no way you can trust me, because honestly?  _ I  _ might be the assassin too, for all you know!”

“Can we all calm down a bit?” Benny says. “Just a bit?”

“It’s rather hard to be calm in these circumstances,” Irving says with just a hint of testiness. “But yes, let’s all make an effort. Now, Peter – Peter?” He looks around, left to right, but their security expert is nowhere to be seen. “Where did he go?”

“Just a moment,” comes the call from the hallway leading to Irving’s office, and a second later, Peter emerges with a large box marked ‘ _ EXTRA SUPPLIES’ _ . He drops it onto a table, and rips the lid off, producing a handheld biometric scanner as well as several wristbands. “Here we go. This should be able to give us  _ some  _ sense of security. I hope.”

Ruth leans over, looks at the newly gathered supplies. “Is this some kind of...? – no, actually. I have no idea. Peter, what’s this all for?”

In lieu of a response, Peter takes the scanner and runs it over her. Blue dancing lights appear on her skin for a brief few moments, and then they’re gone and the scanner’s flashing green. “You’re clear. Your readings match up to the ones taken two months ago. Put this on,” he adds, tossing her a wristband, which she catches and stares at in some amount of bemusement.

Cautiously, she fixes it around her wrist – and the moment she does up the clasp, there’s a hiss and a loud clicking noise and it instantly tightens, making her yelp in surprise. “What happened? What did I do?”

“It’s meant to do that, don’t worry,” he says, moving onto Benny. The scanner comes up green for her as well, and he passes her a wristband as well. “They’ll constantly monitor your lifesigns, make sure you’re still you – and also, they can’t be removed without my codes, which makes them a handy bit of insurance.”

“ _ Right, _ ” says Jack dubiously as Peter turns to scan him. “This sounds all well and good, but how do we know that  _ you’re  _ not the shapeshifter, doing all this to throw us off the scent? It’s what I’d do. If I were the shapeshifter. Which, by the way, I’m totally not, just for the record.”

The light goes green. Peter hands Jack a wristband as well. “Well, I don’t know about you, but if I were a deadly intergalactic assassin with a 99.9% success rating on ratemyassassin dot gal, I’d have taken the opportunity of this empty bar with only three other witnesses and no weapons in sight to just get on with it and off my target already. But I guess you’ll just have to trust me. Alternatively – ” He passes Irving the scanning device and an extra wristband, before affixing one more around his own wrist. “Irving, as the one person in this room who’s probably completely impartial, you can do the honors and run as many scans on me as you want, just to check.”

Irving nods, and begins to do exactly that.

“Well, now we’ve established how to spot any errant shapeshifters trying to worm their way into our little crew – I really should point out that an attack  _ could  _ come from an outside source,” says Jack, ever the devil’s advocate. “Just saying. Any ideas?”

“Well, we probably shouldn’t leave Irving alone for any extended period of time, yeah?” says Ruth, looking around for everyone else’s input. The consensus seems to be nodding. “Or, you know, at all. For safety.”

“Agreed. At least two other people with him at all times,” Peter says. “Until we can work out how to get rid of this assassin.”

“Two?” Benny asks. “Are you sure we don’t need just one person with a really big gun?”

“I can defend myself,” Irving objects.

“Sure you can,” Peter says, then indicates the wristbands. “These are a pretty secure system, but they’re not completely infallible. There’s always a chance that someone could circumvent the failsafe, replace one of us without us knowing. So, two people. That way we’ll have at least one non-assassin person there, guaranteed.”

Benny nods. “Well, you’re the boss.”

“I think you’ll find that  _ I’m _ the boss here,” Irving says, finishing up his scan of Peter. “You appear to be all clear, Peter.”

“Oh, good,” he says dryly, and, when Irving tries to hand the scanner back, shakes his head. “Like I said, you’re the impartial one here. You probably need it more than I do.”

There is an awkward silence as everybody glances at each other again.

“We’re going to have to work out a schedule, of some sort,” Peter suggests. “So. Anyone up for Irvingwatch tonight?”

And they begin to work the details of that out – slowly, awkwardly falling back into the familiar pattern of getting a plan solidified. Irving follows along closely, occasionally providing suggestions – but he’s got a lot on his mind, understandably. It’s not just the knowledge that an assassin is after him, personally, and all the implications of that – there’s more to worry about.

What he hasn’t mentioned yet is the whole matter of killing a Time Lord being remarkably more tricky than you might first imagine. Regeneration exists, of course, meaning that he has quite a number of ‘extra lives’, so to speak – but he can only assume that any assassin worth their salt (and certainly one with a nearly-perfect ratemyassassin score) would already know of his species, and possibly already know of ways to either circumvent the regeneration process – cutting off the head tends to work, strangely enough – or be devious and cruel enough to factor regeneration into the killing itself.

Killing someone over and over again until it sticks has to be either extremely satisfying indeed or excruciatingly boring, and he isn’t quite sure which one would be worse.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “That’s a lot of maybes,” Jack says.

Irving Braxiatel isn’t an idiot – never has been, doesn’t plan to start being one now or any time in the future. He knows full well that with the sort of close-knit life he’s currently living on Legion, any attack against his person is going to come from within his self-made family. The assassin replacing one of the four most important people in his life – Bernice, Jack, Ruth, Peter – is inevitable. It’s simply a matter of  _ when  _ and  _ where  _ and  _ how. _

So Irving waits, and Irving watches. He tries to figure out if any of the four of them are acting strangely or out of character, and – if so – how much of that can be attributed to the stress of the situation. Is Ruth’s refusal to eat dinner with them on Tuesday evening really a result of her poor appetite, like she says, or is there something more sinister going on? Peter’s insistence that Irving should never stay out of his sight – protectiveness or looking for a perfect opportunity to strike? Jack isn’t smiling or laughing or joking in the bar as much as he usually does – poor acting, or just him letting worry leak through his mask for once? Bernice, by contrast, is making a lot more jokes – is that her usual stress reaction or the casual, unrestrained glee of a psychopathic assassin?

He hates doubting his family like this – hates how he’s started to analyse every movement and every microexpression down to the slightest detail, hates how  _ suspicious  _ he’s becoming. And he had just started to trust them properly, too –  _ really  _ trust them. That trust had been rare and wonderful and now it’s just gone, and with every passing day he’s almost legitimately afraid that it’ll never come back. Not that he’d ever share these thoughts with them, of course. Certainly not  _ now,  _ not when the slightest voicing of emotion could prove to be a weakness that one of them, an assassin in disguise, could easily use against him. No, far better to keep up a jovial facade and let them express their worry in his stead.

After the initial alert, it takes a week for something to happen, and that something is poison.

They’re eating together at Bernice’s house, as has become common over the past few days, and it’s Ruth’s turn to cook. She’s ended up making a huge variety of dishes, as many as she can dig up , just because she can and, in her words, “Benny, your fridge has more food than you know what to do with, and if I don’t do  _ something  _ it’s all going to decompose,” – to which Benny mutters something vague about her preferring things that decompose anyway. Everyone ignores her. 

The dinner goes ahead anyway, and is remarkably enjoyable, all things considered. The looming threat of Irving’s faceless assassin seems almost nonexistent in the presence of food, company, and some really quite excellent wine. Conversation flows pleasantly, and Jack is a nuisance, and Peter rolls his eyes and pretends he’s not having just as much fun as the rest of them. Benny is talking about some kind of ‘close-to-home’ archaeological projeqct she’s working on, but she’s being infuriatingly vague with the details. Most of the evening has been dedicated to getting her to drop hints about it. And, really, it’s only when Ruth brings out the main course that things start to go completely fucking pear-shaped.

It starts with Peter poking at his mashed potatoes after taking a bite, and announcing, with a bit of a frown, that it tastes bizarre.

This is what makes Irving freeze like he’s been struck by Medusa’s glare. It had all been going so well, he thinks, which is probably exactly why the universe had chosen that precise moment to interject with a cleared throat and a  _ well, actually... _

“Might be your dog taste buds,” Jack says, cheerfully ready to start a fight, as always. “Aren’t they supposed to be different from normal people’s?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be able to  _ shut up,  _ once in a while?” Peter snipes back.

Ruth leans across the table and dips her finger into Peter’s mashed potatoes, frowning. “I swear I taste-tested everything before I served it,” she mutters, and then sticks her finger into her mouth, ignoring Peter’s ‘ _ hey, wait a second’ –  _ and she frowns even more. “Hey, this  _ does  _ taste weird.”

“Told you,” says Peter, looking a bit miffed, and then Benny leans across the table to swipe a sample from his plate, and he tries to swat her hand away. “ _ Hey! _ Is today ‘Stick Your Grimy Hands Into Peter’s Food Day’, or are you all going to stop doing that?”

Benny’s not listening. She licks the potatoes, and freezes instantly. “That’s aspirin.” Her eyes widen. She looks up at Irving urgently. “You didn’t eat any of the potatoes, did you?”

“I didn’t,” he says, and pushes his plate away from him. “I was going to, but – no.”

“Sorry, what’s aspirin?” Ruth says, fingers going tight around her fork as Benny’s obvious panic catches up to her.

“It’s an obsolete painkiller that fell out of use in the twenty-fifth century,” Irving says. His hearts are pounding, but he refuses to let any amount of this show on his face. “It also happens to be a fatal poison to Time Lords, such as myself.”

Peter’s head whips around to look at the person who cooked the meal, and he goes for his gun – which, of course, he’s always got on his person. “ _ Ruth. _ ”

“Hang on,  _ hang on,  _ I didn’t even know what aspirin  _ is  _ –” Ruth protests, hands reaching up into the air in a  _ don’t-hurt-me-please  _ sort of gesture.

Jack, who’s been sitting next to her all this time, starts inching away from her. Peter keeps his gun trained firmly on her, glaring. Benny is looking at Ruth rather powerlessly, like she doesn’t quite know what to do.

Irving can feel everything falling apart in the sort of helpless way that one looks at a teacup too close to the edge of the table, and knows it’s going to fall off and shatter into millions of pieces any second now. If their group were one or two people larger, they would’ve descended into outright shrieking and violence by now – as it is, they’re all just locked off in a very,  _ very  _ tense standoff.

“Let’s not go around throwing hasty accusations,” he says, as calmly as he can. “After all, we all helped in the kitchen, did we not? Ruth can’t possibly be the only one to blame.”

“Yeah,” says Jack, “but that still means that any of us could have done it. Dare I say it? – that’s  _ not  _ comforting.”

A horrible chill falls over the table at this. Irving scans everybody, looking for hints or clues, but suddenly everybody seems blank-faced and tense. Unwilling to give even the slightest bit of information away. Not surprising, really.

But he’s nearly certain of it, now. One of the people at this table is an imposter. He’s fairly sure that everybody else – including the imposter – knows that he knows this, and judging by the solemn, frightened atmosphere, they have as little an idea as to what to do about it as he does.

Quite apart from the fact that one person here is actively trying to kill him – and being as stealthy as they can about it, too – there’s the awful, distant implication of whatever has happened to the person who’s been replaced. Captured, locked away somewhere, or – most likely – dead. He doesn’t want to think about it, of course, but the mental image of Ruth, Jack, Bernice, or (gods forbid) Peter – lying somewhere in a distant alleyway in Legion, limbs askew and eyes gazing blankly upwards; having died without anybody to witness their passing – it’s as enthralling as it is terrible.

There’s a game that they played once during a particular quiet night at the White Rabbit, a game that Jack taught them all the rules of (and probably cheated mercilessly at after doing so, but that’s really not the point). He had called it simply ‘Traitor’, and it had involved them, as a group, trying to work out which among them was the randomly assigned mutinous saboteur aboard a fictional spacecraft, without letting on who the (equally randomly assigned) captain of the ship was – all before the traitor in question managed to work out who the captain was, through context clues, and shove them out the nearest airlock. As all of them were (of course) greatly accustomed to bluffing and lying and making things up, simply by nature of having survived so long on Legion and the greater universe in general, the rounds of this game had ended up being invariably entertaining, and the source of much indignant screeching over the outcome of the rounds.

In hindsight, this game is no longer quite so entertaining when it’s applied to real life. The identity of the ‘captain’, of course, is known to everybody – so it’s not quite a perfect analogue – but it’s certainly close enough to be uncomfortably reminiscent. Bernice and Jack, Irving remembers, had been particularly good at the bluffing and fooling other people aspect of the game. But of course this wouldn’t apply – the assassin might just be better at pretending than all of them combined, for all they know.

He looks at them all, and wonders if any of them are thinking about the late-night games of Traitor too, or if he’s just being fanciful to distract himself from what he really needs to do.

He pulls the scanning device from the inside of his coat, and flicks it on. He takes readings from all of them – Ruth first. She’s clear, no sign of any change except an elevated heart rate (and really, if her heart rate  _ weren’t  _ elevated, he’d be suspicious). Benny and Jack – perfectly normal, not a single deviation from their regular life signs. Peter is just the same. He looks up at them, and shakes his head once – nothing.

“Suddenly,” says Peter, eyeing the food in front of him, “I’m not very hungry at all.”

“I’m sorry,” says Ruth – face ashen, voice small. “Irving, I’m – I’m so, so sorry, I know you don’t, you  _ can’t  _ believe me, but... god, I’d never try to poison you, I  _ swear.  _ This was supposed to – I was trying to – this was a  _ nice  _ dinner –” she breaks off, and buries her face in her hands, clearly distraught.

“I’d say it’s not your fault,” says Irving, not unkindly, “but, really, we’ve no way of knowing that it isn’t.”

She’s not crying, not exactly, but her eyes are slightly red when she looks up and says, “yeah. Yeah, I know.”

Cleaning up is as awkward as you’d expect. Nobody really wants to eat any of the remaining food, delicious as it may look, and everybody is simultaneously avoiding eye contact and trying their utmost to analyse everybody around them for any signs of being a psychopathic assassin.

“We don’t even know if it’s one of us,” Peter says. “Maybe they’re not fooling the scanner at all. Maybe they managed to get it into the food while none of us were looking, or maybe they’ve managed to be invisible, or – ”

“That’s a lot of maybes,” Jack says.

He’s right. It  _ is  _ a lot of maybes. 

And Irving doesn’t like it one bit.

More murder attempts follow. Most notably, an honest-to-god safe nearly hits Irving while he’s walking down the street to get to the bar one morning – which, as Benny so rightly points out once everybody’s done panicking (or pretending to panic, in the case of whoever the shapeshifter is), is wholly unnecessary and not all that accurate and reliable, as assassination methods go. It begins to get rather ridiculous, to be perfectly honest – at one point, he’s pushed aside by a wide-eyed, panting Ruth just in time to avoid being crushed by a safe – an actual, honest-to-god safe.

He can only conclude that these increasingly farcical murder attempts are a complete sham, because no assassin worth their salt would actually be trying to kill him in such ineffective ways. No, it’s far more likely that these are to detract attention away from the real murder attempt – which is no doubt imminent and very subtle indeed – and away from whoever the real assassin is, for whatever reason. He can’t even begin to imagine what the logic behind this is.

And then on Thursday, events come to a head, far quicker and far more dramatically than anybody could have predicted.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Stop giving me that look. Come on and give me a hand, instead.”

Bernice and Peter are sharing Irvingwatch on this particular evening. Peter’s keeping an eye on the cameras while Benny reluctantly helps at the bar – which they’ve had to keep open both to prevent their group from losing any more money than is strictly necessary and to keep Irving from going mad with boredom.

“I genuinely don’t know why I employ Jack,” Irving’s saying from by the register, watching Benny mix drinks for the few customers. “It’s been nearly six months and he still hasn’t quite got the hang of bartending. You clearly know what you’re doing.”

“It’s because you’ve developed an inordinate fondness for all of us over those six months,” Benny says, stacking dirty glasses to one side and grabbing clean ones with her other hand, “and as weird as it may seem, Jack  _ is  _ included in that. Also, I’m an archaeology professor, not a bartender.”

“You’re doing an exceptionally good job of pretending to be the latter,” he says. “I should get you in here more often.”

“Oh, the clientele’d miss Jack,” she says, slinging a towel over one arm. “He’s got a lot more charm than I do, much as I hate to say it.” She looks out over the bar. “Speaking of which – is it just me, or is it not as loud as it usually is in here?”

He follows her gaze, and frowns slightly, because she’s right. Thursday night at the White Rabbit is usually their busiest evening – which isn’t saying much at all, but the current number of people clinging to the edges of the room are definitely quite a lot less than their usual amount. “I really do hope you’re not suggesting there’s something nefarious going on.”

Benny frowns, and puts down the bottle of whiskey she’s holding. “I hope not,” she says. “Hang on.” She prods at the intercom that they installed behind the bar a few months ago. “Peter? Did you get all that?”

A few seconds pass. There’s no response.

She jabs at the button again. “Peter?” she says, and barely waits for the nonresponsiveness to continue before turning to Irving. “I’ll be right back. Don’t die before I can figure out what’s going on here.”

“Perish the thought,” he says, mouth twitching slightly in barely-hidden worry.

She nods and vaults over the bar with the practiced ease of someone who’s spent too long of her life dodging a whole lot of bullets and jumping over walls to avoid being attacked, and dashes in the direction of the control room.

“That was unnecessary,” Irving calls at her back.

“ _ You’re  _ unnecessary!” she yells back at him.

She’s only gone for two, maybe three minutes, before she’s sprinting right back in his direction, looking white as a sheet.

“Bernice-?” he begins.

“ _ No time we’ve got to go come ON _ ,” she yells, and she looks so desperate and sounds so serious that he immediately drops what he’s doing and scrambles out from behind the counter to follow her. She crashes out the door, Irving following in her wake, and looks back and forth before swivelling right and charging off down the street – not looking back at him, but extending a hand in his direction nonetheless. He grasps onto it with a lack of any other better thing to do, and she pulls him along.

“If you’d care to explain what the meaning of this sudden departure is,” he gasps, “that would be just fine by me! I’m sure you have your reasons, but – ”

“It’s Peter,” she says, looking absolutely distraught. “He was talking with someone on his communicator and when I came in he threatened to kill me – said he was coming for you next –”

“ _ What? _ ” Irving stops abruptly, making her stumble and trip as he ends up inadvertently tugging her back. “Are you telling me you believe that my assassin has took the form of him?”

“I mean, unless you can think of any  _ other  _ reason my son’s decided that shooting me in the head, then moving speedily onto  _ you _ appears to be the fun, cool plan of the evening, I’d say so, yes!”

“And how do you expect me to believe that?” he demands, instantly suspicious. “This could very well be a ploy to get me alone.”

Behind him, there is the sound of the doors of the White Rabbit slamming open with enough force to shatter bones, and a loud, animal-like growl that echoes all over the street, dangerous enough to make even the most hardened of Legion-dwelling criminals stop in their tracks and pay attention.

Irving glances back, and sees that, yes – Peter does indeed look rather murder-y. And his hand is at his side, where a rather massive gun resides. And he’s starting in their direction, at a breakneck pace.

“Ah,” he says. It’s a very convincing piece of evidence.

“Uh- _ huh _ ,” she agrees. “Come on –  _ move! _ ”

And they move. Benny doesn’t seem to have an exact idea of where she’s going – she’s choosing streets to turn down and twist through seemingly at random, which seems like the best way to lose their unlikely pursuer. They make it into a particularly boisterous crowd, and then duck their heads, slowing to a walk – trying their best to remain unseen.

“All right,” says Benny in a low tone. “So, clearly we need a plan.”

“Clearly,” Irving says, dry and tense. “I suggest we – ”

“ _ Irving! _ ”

Both Benny and Irving stop, and stare at each other for a moment. It seems almost eerily silent for far too long as they wait, barely daring to breathe. And then they hear Peter again.

“Get away from Irving Braxiatel or I  _ swear  _ you’re going to pay for it,” comes his voice, strong and carrying clearly over the noise of the Legion residents around them. Across the street, a small crowd of people parts in response to Peter storming down the street. Right in their direction. And just as Benny and Irving notice his approach, his eyes lock onto them and narrow to dark, angry slits. Quick as anything, a gun appears in his hand so fast that it’s hard to tell where he pulled it from. He flicks off the safety catch and, without warning, breaks into a full-on sprint, hard and fast and furious. Civilians scatter in his wake, panicked.

Irving reaches out to grab Benny’s hand at about the exact same moment that she reaches out to grab his.

“Run?” she says.

“Run,” he agrees. And no further talking is necessary. The two of them turn in near-perfect synchronization, dash for the nearest alleyway, and just kept on dashing – the sounds of Peter’s furious yelling retreating into the distance behind them.

At the corner of a particularly dark and nondescript alleyway, they pause briefly to catch their breath. “He knows we’re onto him,” Irving says grimly. “It’s the only reason he’d tip his hand like that. The only question is,  _ how?  _ I thought we were being rather discreet about it, myself...”

“He pulled a  _ gun, _ ” Benny pants, sounding immensely distressed. “A gun. On  _ me. _ That – that can’t be – that really wasn’t Peter, was it?”

“Well, let’s not oversimplify, here!” Irving says. “I  _ am  _ the one he’s trying to kill, after all! You’re more likely just, well, collateral damage – in his eyes.”

“I’ll give  _ you  _ collateral damage,” mutters Benny, and then, “we can’t outrun him forever – you know that, right?”

Irving grimaces. He leans heavily against the side of the alleyway. “I know. And there’s no real possibility of talking him – or rather, the entity pretending to be him – down. Our only real options are confronting and restraining him ourselves, or getting someone else to do it for us. And I really don’t think we have the ability or resources for the former, do you?”

“Absolutely not,” Benny agrees. “Killoran strength and endurance, plus all that pre-existing assassination knowledge they’ve got in that deadly little hypermalleable head of theirs? An absolutely deadly combination, if I do say so myself. They couldn’t have picked a better person to kill you if they’d tried.”

“Well, I don’t know about that –” Irving begins, and then shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. Either way, we need someone who can deal with a notorious shapeshifting assassin effectively and conclusively, and we need that person here as soon as possible.”

“Well, we could contact the local authorities –”

“Peter  _ is  _ the local authorities,” Irving reminds her.

“...bugger. I keep on forgetting about that.” Benny thinks for a moment. “Right. How about this. Mirage is some sort of notorious criminal, right? They’ve got to have a whole lot of galactic agencies chasing after them. If we can find some sort of safe place on Legion to hole up in, we can just call in one or all of them to pick up our guy, and – well. Desperately hope they don’t find some way to get in, or to wreak further havoc on Legion while we’re hiding.”

“But where-?”

“ _ Found you. _ ”

Benny stiffens and Irving’s mouth straightens into a thin line, and they both turn to see Peter advancing on them, gun still drawn and primed.

“Step away from Irving,  _ Professor Summerfield, _ ” says Peter, looking – well,  _ tired.  _ He’s been looking increasingly more and more exhausted since all of the assassination business began, and now it finally seems as if they have a reason for that – maintaining a consistent shapeshifted form for nearly a week can’t exactly be an easy task.

“Uh, you know what? I don’t think I will,” Benny snaps, and takes a very deliberate step towards Irving.

“Bernice,” says Irving under his breath, “I really do appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t think that – “

“Shut up, Irving,” Benny says, looking tense.

Peter glances between the two of them, clearly conflicted for some reason. “Look, I don’t want to hurt you, but – ”

In one smooth, clean, but entirely unexpected and unpredictable move, Benny surges forwards, dragging Irving by the hand, and knocks Peter sideways into the wall. He lets out a small noise of surprise and pain, and then snarls, turning to chase them – but they’re already running again.

“I really do hope you had a plan beyond  _ that _ ,” Irving yells at her, no doubt noting the fact that Peter is already in hot pursuit from several metres behind them.

Benny laughs, surprisingly brightly despite the high stakes and tension of their current situation. “When have you ever know me to  _ not  _ have a plan?” she calls back. “Just two more streets, come on –”

They go through two more streets, ducking and twisting in and out of alleyways at frenetic speeds, and then through a few more. Eventually, Benny skids to a halt in front of a particular alleyway, and is down on her knees even as Irving nearly over balances and slams into the nearest wall. He grumbles, brushes himself off, and then takes a proper look at what she’s doing.

“You have  _ got  _ to be joking,” he says, eyeing Benny as she prises up a large, heavy and surprisingly old-looking manhole cover. “Bernice –”

“Stop giving me that look,” she says, despite the fact that she’s facing away from him and could objectively have no idea whatsoever what kind of ‘look’ he’s actually giving her. “Come on and give me a hand, instead.”

Grudgingly, he comes over to assist. Lifting the cover is easier with two, and the moment they’ve pulled it up and discarded it to one side, Benny’s already scrambling down into the darkness – because, strangely enough, the hole doesn’t lead straight to a drop into the Legion sewers. There’s a rickety steel ladder on one side of it, and that ladders leads down deeper than is visible from the surface.

Irving hangs back. “Bernice, are you quite certain-?”

“Coward,” calls Benny, her voice echoing from the depths – she’s already barely visible, a dim shadow retreating downwards and out of sight.

“ _ Hey _ ,” he says.

She looks up at him. Her face is a vague, exasperated circle. “Look, do you  _ want  _ my gun-wielding, shapeshifted copy of a son to kill you horribly or not?” A beat, and then, more genuinely. “Don’t you trust me?”

The hesitation lasts only a moment longer. “Of course,” he says, and lowers himself somewhat less-than-elegantly into the exposed manhole, pausing only very briefly to drag the cover back into position above them – trapping them in darkness. He then starts clambering blindly downwards after her. “If I may ask – ”

“Less talking, more climbing,” she says. “I don’t know if Peter – well, the assassin – knows about this place. I want to make it to the – ”

“Yes,” he says, cutting across her – well-versed in the sport of interrupting Benny before she can get into ‘rambling’ territory. “It’s about that _.  _ Where, precisely are we? And how long do you think we’ll be climbing for? I don’t want to end up creasing my suit jacket any more than it already is.”

She laughs, a brief noise of joy that floats upwards and then fades in the somewhat less-than-concert-hall-quality acoustics. “Of course  _ that’s _ what you’re worried about. Never change, Irving.”

“This place,” he says, prompting. He fumbles, misses a rung, and then redoubles his efforts at climbing down with renewed vigour. Benny sounds like she’s some distance below him, which means that colliding with her is hardly a problem.

“Shouldn’t be too long down,” she says. “The city plans did say it was only a hundred feet or so...”

“City plans,” he says. “So this has something to do with that ‘close-to-home archaeological expedition’ you mentioned a few days ago?”

“Uh-huh,” she says, and then lets out a little pained  _ oof.  _ There’s the sound of boots stumbling on concrete, and she swears lightly under her breath before saying, “the ground’s right here, careful. Hang on – I’ll get a light – ”

Irving descends the final stretch of ladder far more cautiously, and manages to get to the ground without serious incident. As he does, a torch light flickers on and sweeps around, catching the ceiling and walls of a moderately cramped tunnel that’s rather drab in appearance, all things considered. It flashes across his face before coming to rest on the far wall. Benny’s visible in the dim light, looking simultaneously nervous and very excited in that particular way that she only really got when making a grand discovery.

“This is the first time I’ve been down here,” she says, tone a bit hushed.

Irving takes a deep breath in, noting that the air is somewhat stale but still breathable. “I take it that this is... at a guess, some form of early Legion underground structure?”

Benny nods, the torchlight bobbing along with her. “Before the dome was properly erected, living underground was apparently much more sustainable for the early Legion settlers. Horrifically unsurvivable surface, and all that.” She sweeps her torch from side to side. “They completely abandoned it after the dome went up, though. Not many people know it’s still here. Shame, really. It’s actually quite well-constructed.”

“Living here can’t have been all that intellectually stimulating,” Irving says, glancing around. There’s nothing much to speak of that’s visible around them. The long corridor branches out in both directions, with intersections scattered at irregular intervals, but there’s no carvings on the walls, no particular interesting variations in the structure that would mark it as different from any other underground bunker – nothing that marks it as unique or homely in the least. “The ‘horrifically unsurvivable surface’ must have seemed like paradise compared to this.”

Benny nods again, conceding the point. “Hopefully it’s going to serve our purposes, though. Even if Peter – the assassin – whatever – works out we’re down here, there’s a place that I think we might be able to hide out until the intergalactic authorities can show up to assist.”

“You have a map of this place?”

“No, but I’d like to think my memory’s pretty good. And, you know, I’ve got a general idea of where to go.”

Irving smiles. “Then lead the way, Professor Summerfield.”

And she does. All the way down the hallways leading east, through a couple of twists and turns with characteristic confidence and cheerfulness, only pausing just a few times to  _ hmm  _ and  _ wait, maybe this way  _ and  _ nope, definitely this way, I had it right the first time.  _ They pass by open doors to all sorts of rooms and areas – abandoned bunker bedrooms stripped of all personal items, indoor marketplaces with nothing in their stalls and no salespeople to sell the nothing, kitchens and bathrooms and long-dead gardens. And at the end of one long stretch of empty corridor, a large wrought-iron door with an elaborate locking system visible all over it. It’s possibly the sturdiest-looking door they’ve encountered so far – it seems to have endured the test of time rather well. Benny wastes no time in digging out a key hung on a long chain that matches the style and age of the door from inside her jacket, and holding it up to the keyhole in the door.

“I thought you said you hadn’t been down here,” Irving says, eyebrows jumping upwards a fraction.

“Hm?” She looks up at him, then down at the key in her hand. “Oh – yeah. Nicked it from the city maintenance offices a few days ago, just in case. You can never be too prepared, and all that.”

“‘Just in case’?”

Benny fits the key to the keyhole, and it turns, with some effort. There’s a pneumatic-sounding hiss and then the locks all over the door start clicking open one by one. In seconds, it’s swinging open, and Benny is casting a rueful kind of look over her shoulder at Irving. “I’m taking a leaf out of your book – you know. Thinking a million steps ahead, that sort of Braxiatel thing.”

“A million,” he says, amused despite himself.

“...well, maybe not quite that much. The point is – ” She pushes open the door fully – it creaks and protests – and she steps into the open, massive chamber beyond. “ – there’s no way I’m letting Peter catch us. Not at this point. Come  _ on _ , Irving,” she adds.

The inside of the room is... large. Much larger than the rest of this compound. It’s more like a small arena, actually – it’s circular, well built; and the ceiling is tall. There appears to be a viewing gallery far above where they are, although there’s no real discernible way to get up to it from the ground floor. And there’s actually light streaming in from above – although not all that much. It’s just a tiny circle of light emanating from high, high above them – probably from street-level.

Irving takes only a moment to work it out. “A fighting arena,” he says.

Benny’s relocking the door from this side with her key. “Yep,” she affirms. “Anybody who comes to Legion has  _ some  _ amount of anger to work out. Apparently early settlers were no exception.”

“Fighting for sport?” Irving’s gaze travels around the room, taking in the solid walls with suspicious dents and stains all over them, and the grates embedded in the floor that he was realizing now were probably there to carry away any blood or various other bodily fluids. “That’s... rather barbaric, really.”

“Can’t be as bad as the White Rabbit’s weekly free-for-all bar fights,” Benny points out. The iron door shuts with a series of clunks and hisses. She turns, and regards the key in her hand thoughtfully. “We’re probably going to be here a while,” she notes.

“It’s likely, yes,” Irving says. “Shall we attempt to contact the authorities now? I believe my communicator might just have the range to get the message through from here.”

Benny looks at him for a long, long moment. Then she grins brightly and she holds up the key. “I don’t think so,” she says, and tosses it at the nearest floor grate. It goes clattering through, and hits the inside of the filtration system with a dull  _ cling. _

“Ah,” says Irving. His face betrays no amount of surprise whatsoever. “You know, I was wondering when you were going to do that.”

She looks at him, mouth curling up sideways slightly like she’s trying not to laugh at some ridiculous claim of his. “You were?” And then she actually does laugh, snorting a bit. “Actually, yeah. Of course you knew. Irving Braxiatel, master of being a million steps ahead. Out of interest – when did you figure it out? I thought I was doing pretty well, as a matter of fact.”

“It’s been niggling at the corner of my mind for a while now,” he admits. “But I must admit, your possession of that key was a very good indication. As was the fact that you lead us to such a secluded location, when one with many people within it would have probably served as much better cover.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Then the question becomes: if you  _ knew  _ I was planning on killing you the second we were alone, then why the hell did you follow me inside in the first place?”

He meets her gaze levelly. “Because confronting you head-on is by far the most direct way to find out what you did with you did with the  _ real  _ Bernice.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I make a point to hold grudges against anyone who’s actively trying to kill me."

She’s smiling. She’s smiling  _ normally.  _ The bright eyes and the one side of her mouth slightly crookedly higher than the other, and the lightly crossed arms, it’s all Bernice Summerfield, through and through. The incongruity of it actually stings – the fact that she hasn’t dropped the mask yet, hasn’t revealed her true visage of hatred or cold indifference, that despite being found out she’s still keeping up the pretence.

“Ouch,” she says. “That hurts, that really does. Well – knowing you, you’re probably not going to accept this, but believe it or not, I  _ am  _ the real Bernice.”

“Mhm. Because of course Professor Bernice Surprise Summerfield, my dear friend and esteemed colleague does, in fact, want to kill me in a way that seems both horribly gruesome and terribly permanent, if what I’m picking up via context clues is anything to go by.” He stares her down, unimpressed. “If you couldn’t tell, I’m currently feeling rather sceptical about all of this.”

“Just because I want to kill you doesn’t mean we can’t be friends,” she objects.

“Friends don’t lead friends into long-abandoned fighting arenas with the express intent of cold-blooded murder taking place the moment the doors are locked,” Irving says sharply. He’s furious, properly and completely furious. But showing that would be tipping his hand – giving this impostor some amount of leverage. No, better to stay detached.

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, well, friends also don’t stay quiet about their friends’ son hallucinating a dead boyfriend for months on end, only revealing it when everybody’s lives are in mortal peril and you’re about to blow an entire moon up. And yet, here we both are.”

There’s a tense moment of silence between them.

“There is quite a world of difference between those two –” he begins.

“Also, you killed my husband in an alternate timeline.”

“...touché.”

She grins, rears back, and throws her torch at the nearest wall. It breaks on impact, the tiny light flickering off and leaving them in the dim, watery light that’s left emanating from far up above. The loud noise and the loss of light are, in combination, just distracting enough that Irving only notices what Benny’s doing when she’s already in mid-leap, hands stretched out right towards his throat. She collides with him sharply, slamming into his chest and knocking him to the ground – and, in turn, he moves with the impact, flipping her backwards off him before she can even have a chance to get a proper grasp on him. She goes tumbling across the floor and scrambles for purchase for a second or two, before swivelling around into a crouch.

“No weapons?” Irving says, springing to his feet. He strips himself of his suit jacket, tossing it to one side, and rolls up his sleeves in two quick movements. “It’s quite unlike you to show up to a confrontation unprepared.”

“Well, I do have my sonic trowel,” she says, and lunges at him again. “I could try to excavate you to death, if you want? It’d definitely be a unique way to go.” She slams an elbow into his ribs, goes for his eyes with her other hand. Her fingernails are sharper than usual; it looks like she hasn’t been trimming them back like she usually does.

“Unique and undignified,” Irving points out, catching her hand easily. “Undignified being the last way I want to go, of course.” He squeezes, and then squeezes harder, and can actually feel the bones starting to give way when his shoulder suddenly flares up with agony, and then Benny’s on him again, tugging her hand out of his and spitting blood out of her mouth as she starts slamming her fists into him with a single minded determination that’s actually unnerving.

“You bit me?! - ” he begins, genuinely affronted, and then realizes it’s not going to do any good because she just keeps going and it’s beginning to honestly hurt more than a bit. He grunts and then growls, and flings her off of him. She staggers back, and then dashes forwards again, and then he shoves her,  _ hard,  _ and she topples over and crumples to the ground. And then she coughs, and she rolls over, and she shoots him an impressed look.

“Nice one,” she says, his blood still trickling down her chin. “You’ve been working out.”

He doesn’t have the patience for this anymore. “No weapons,” he says, one hand to the curved wall of the arena to steady himself. “Why not?”

“Not personal enough,” she says.

“Not personal –  _ you don’t even know me. _ ”

“‘Course I know you,” she says, brushing her hair away from her eyes in that very particular way of hers. She tilts her head at him, considering. “You have a ridiculous fondness for the nineteenth-century German opera  _ Tristan und Isolde _ , and if you get drunk enough off ginger beer, you’ll wax poetic about it for hours. That and how much you love all of us, I mean. We’ve only managed to get you to do that three times. Your favorite color is a dark navy blue that’s nearly indistinguishable from black. You and I once had a grand adventure in an alien marketplace that we swore a solemn pact not to tell anybody about, ever, because it’s far too embarrassing. You and Jack are at each other’s throats all the time, but if anyone tried to hurt him you’d burn the planet in an instant. Same for all of us, really. Your favorite movie is  _ The Princess Bride _ – ”

“Yes, all right! That’s quite enough, I think!”

“Couldn’t agree more,” she tells him cheerfully, and uses the ground as a springboard to launch herself at him. She goes for his throat again, which honestly makes the most tactical sense. She’s smaller than him and not as physically strong, and the throat’s one of the obvious weak points – it’s hard to build up muscle there, no matter how hard you’re trying. He ducks and weaves skilfully out of the way of every swipe, every blow.

They tread a wide circle around the arena, going back and forth – her attacking, him driving her back whenever he can and dodging her whenever she can’t. She’s relentless and clever and there’s a glint of determination in her eyes that is eerily familiar. They keep at this for a while, and she looks like she’s started to fall into an easy rhythm of this – and that’s when Irving makes his move. He rushes at her, slamming her backwards and driving her to the nearest wall. He pushes her up against it, twisting her hands tightly upwards behind her back, and holding her feet down with a foot of his own. She struggles and swears, but he holds firm.

“Where’s Bernice?” he asks, and she turns her head sideways, frowning at him like he’s just made a really obvious mistake that she almost can’t believe he’s voicing aloud.

“I’m right here,” she says, and then headbutts him backwards, slamming her head right into his face. Something gives, with a messy  _ crack  _ and a sharp sting of intense pain that makes his eyes water. He staggers back, ears ringing, and she takes the opportunity to dart in, bodycheck him to the ground with a grunt, and wrap her fingers around his neck and start squeezing. He gasps and chokes and tries to get her off him, but she kneels on his hands and presses down harder and even harder, and she waits for the life to drain out of him, even as blood trickles from his now-crooked nose – the nose that she’s almost certainly broken. She waits.

And waits.

And waits.

He raises an eyebrow at her. Words are not necessary to communicate just how unimpressed he is by this. She scowls, face lighting up with annoyed realization, and says, “bloody respiratory bypass system, nearly forgot – ” and before she can start on more creative avenues of murder, he knees her sharply in the stomach.

She goes  _ oof _ ; falls off him, and then Irving moves, following her trajectory so that they end up in a more-or-less reversed position than the one they were in only moments before. But instead of strangling her, he just restrains her with one hand to the forehead, and presses the other to the side of her head.

“I would be sorry about this,” he says, “but I make a point to hold grudges against anyone who’s actively trying to kill me. This  _ will  _ hurt.”

She grins up at him, and then lets out a pained noise as he dives right into her head, none-too-gently – ripping past all the fragile barriers there and breezing right through the basic surface thoughts of  _ I could twist and duck under his arm and then fingers to the eyes and a knee to the crotch  _ (no, she couldn’t, he’s effectively got her paralysed) and  _ his voice has gone all menacing and dark now he’s really angry _ (yes – yes, he is, very much so) and then he’s in her mind, and it’s bright and warm and curious with a thousand times and places and adventures and stories in there, and she loves him and Peter and Jack and Ruth so very much that it both humbles and hurts him in equal measure, and it’s one hundred percent, categorically, unquestionably Bernice Summerfield’s mind. There is no way that anyone, shapeshifter or otherwise, could have replicated her neural pathways and thoughts and memories to this astounding degree.

He feels a wave of sudden guilt at having (somewhat inadvertently) entered her mind in such an invasive and distressing manner, but he forces that aside and stuffs it into a box somewhere dark and far-away to deal with later. He can’t think about that right now. Because none of this changes the fact that  _ kill Irving Braxiatel  _ is at the forefront of her mind, and is in fact woven into quite a few other thoughts and feelings besides. And the way it’s framed is bizarre too; the murderous intentions are there right alongside the love and affection, neither one diminishing or affecting the other. She wants to kill him. He is her best friend.

He breaks away from the mental contact for just a second to stare at her in abject concern and no small amount of horror. “Whatever happened to you?” he says. It comes out as little more than a whisper.

She shrugs and sticks her tongue out at him like they’re having an argument over cocktail glasses in the White Rabbit. And then she tries to headbutt him again. When that doesn’t work, she starts trying to kick him and knee at him, and so he paralyses her body with the slightest thought and dives right back in, going deeper this time.

It takes him a moment or two to find it, but once he understands what he’s seeing, it seems so obvious that he can’t believe he had ever missed it. Her mind is her own, but there’s something else there – draped over the framework, soaking into her very essence like brine. A completely different entity.

_ You’re not a shapeshifter,  _ he thinks at it, realization quickly dawning.  _ You’re a parasite. _

_ Parasite’s such an ugly term,  _ comes the response. It’s not from the creature, not really. It sounds like Benny – it is, in fact, Benny – but then again, she and the creature are now so closely intertwined at this point that to refer to one is to refer to the other, and vice versa.  _ What I was before I joined with her is irrelevant. Right now, I’m Bernice Surprise Summerfield, and that’s all that matters. _

“You seem to have done your research wrong.” His eyes open again, and he looks at her. She looks right back at him, sardonic annoyance all over her face. “You claim to be Benny, but I don’t believe that she would ever truly want to kill me. A major part of you is an alien entity that’s taken hold of her, and I would really quite appreciate it if that major part would  _ get out.” _

“I don’t want to kill you? – you think that?” she says, and laughs. “Oh, wow – you actually,  _ really  _ think that?”

“I  _ know  _ that Benny doesn’t want to kill me,” he says. “I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the assassin who has been specifically sent to kill me would do it without a second’s thought. Speaking of which, in fact – ” He tilts his head slightly to the side, eyes narrowing. “Why her? I’m sure there’s dozens of more apt candidates to carry out the perfect assassination. I live on Legion, for goodness’s sake. This is the ultimate den of thieves and murderers and general miscreants; there almost certainly is a sharpshooter or two who could have taken me out with a swift bullet to the head. Why all the song and dance?”

“It’s not about  _ ability, _ ” she says. “Any idiot can kill. All you need is a rock and a hand to lift it with. If I needed someone powerful enough to kill you, I’d have jumped into Peter or Jack or even  _ you _ .” She flicks him a wry little grin, like they’re both in on the joke. “But no. I needed motivation. Someone who actually had the potential to want to kill you, and was already close enough that you’d trust them. Hence. Me.”

“You don’t hate me,” he says, despite an awful sinking feeling taking root in his chest.

“I don’t hate  _ you, _ ” she agrees. “I hate what you’re going to become. And I do feel bad about the whole killing-you thing – seriously, I do, you have no idea how heartbroken I’m gonna feel about this later – but I’ve got to get paid and I’ve also got to make sure that you don’t royally screw over the lives of everyone I know in the past or the future or – you know, whenever –”

Irving breathes in sharply, a sudden angry intake of air. “I should hardly need to lecture you about the dangers of time paradoxes, Bernice – ”

“Time paradoxes?  _ Time paradoxes? _ ” She’s suddenly just as angry as he is, and he feels a sudden jerk and then a prickling feeling of being uprooted out of her mind one tendril after another, and then he’s expelled suddenly, and she’s raising her head sharply, entirely of her own accord, and glaring at him. “ _ Look who’s talking. _ ”

And she’s up again, somehow. She strikes out at him, and he uses her weight against her, spinning her off to one side. She grabs his arm, drags them both together, and attempts to judo flip him over her back. She actually succeeds – it had been such an audacious move he hadn’t even seen it coming – and although he ends up landing in a crouch (he feels the seams of his shirt tear slight, and silently bemoans the destruction of his wardrobe) this doesn’t end up helping very much at all. The moment he’s on the ground she’s already scrambling up his back and wrapping her legs around his torso, and anchoring herself around his throat with two arms in place and squeezing tight.

“You do remember, of course, that choking me to death is quite impossible,” he pants, trying to shake her off.

“Mhm,” she agrees, and starts trying to gouge out his eyes instead – which is not much of a situational improvement. He grabs her wrists, and twists sharply at the waist so she starts to lose her grip there, and then he flips her again, slamming her to the ground with a huff of exertion. She rolls, flips herself to her feet, comes at him again – at an angle, this time, trying to check him from the side and use his weight and position against him, but he only very barely manages to grab her forearm.

“The excellent thing about being me is that I  _ know _ you’re not going to hurt me,” she says, breathless with adrenaline, aiming a clean hard kick at his shins. It hurts, really hurts quite a bit, but not quite as much as his broken nose, so he endures it. “I can do anything I want to you and the worst you’re going to do is knock me unconscious and give me a few bruises. And that’s if you’re having a bad day.”

“You really think that?” he says, tensing against her, trying to force her backwards even as she holds firm. He’s playing for time, trying to get enough space and a few snatched moments of brief calm so he can come up with a plan, a decent plan that they both can emerge alive from. “What makes you so sure?”

“I know you, remember?” she says. And tries to bite him. Playing dirty, of course – the best way to win a fight. “Oh, the  _ other  _ you, sure, he’d do anything to save his skin, but you – you don’t want to be him! You’re trying to be  _ honourable.  _ It’s sweet, it really is.”

On one level, he’s aware that she’s right – hurting Benny, after all his alternate self already did to her? Utterly unforgivable. But on the other, he does so love proving people wrong. And this creature wearing Benny’s skin and memories and personality is making him quite angry indeed.

And so he raises an eyebrow at her, snarls, “ _ try me, _ ” and with one short sharp decisive motion snaps her arm – feels it break cleanly in two – hears her gasp in surprise and then her screech of pain as she stumbles back, and feels legitimate horror welling up inside him from what he’s done, because  _ what has he done – _

_ – _ and then she’s on him again, knee using her other arm dominantly and keeping the other one loose and out of the way, and tears are running down her cheeks but she’s not making any noises of pain, and although her voice is a bit shaky, she’s still perfectly audible when she says, “didn’t know you had it in you. Maybe you’re more like the other Brax than I thought you were.”

And the disturbing part isn’t how easily he slipped into the mindset of fighting her as forcefully and effectively as he possibly can, nor is it how hard this particular observation of hers is hitting home. No, the  _ truly _ disturbing part is how, despite him giving this fight all he can give, she  _ just keeps getting up again. _

For just a moment, he takes a very deep breath, and runs over some important facts in his head, lightning-fast.

One: Irving is quite excellent as far as estimates go, and he’s made a fair few based on him and his family over the years – idle observations, mainly, out of sheer boredom. One of them is thusly: he could almost certainly beat her in a short race, a sprint; but if it ever came down to a marathon between all of them, Bernice would win out of sheer endurance.

Two: Benny can think on her feet in ways that he can’t even begin to dream of. He’s a plotter and a planner but things like that take time. She has raw ingenuity, tempered in the flame of a thousand inexplicable life events and experiences, and a sort of beautiful unpredictability to her that he can’t help but admire – even if he’d never tell it to her face.

Three: This combination Bernice-and-assassin seems to have every ounce of Benny’s cunning and endurance ingenuity. She  _ is _ , in every way that matters except one, Bernice. Separating them is hard in his mind and is likely to also be very hard indeed in reality.

And one last very unfortunate fact – he has never known Bernice Summerfield to ever lose a fight. Not really – not any fights that matter. She always comes out of any situation (no matter how grim or how unwinnable it may seem) alive, at the very least. The very fact that she’s made it to Legion is a testament to that. _Bernice Summerfield does not lose._ Not even to Irving Braxiatel – history has proven that. The assassin really couldn’t have picked a better host.

Which doesn’t bode well for him in the slightest, to be perfectly honest.

And it’s taken him far too long to come up with the solution, but he’s finally stumbled upon it. There’s only one thing to do to make sure that he doesn’t die in the process of her winning once again – he’s got to change the rules of the fight, and fast.

She makes the mistake of trying to kick him. It’s a mistake because it means her centre of gravity’s off-balance for just a few seconds – and it’s in those few seconds that Irving puts his plan into action. He comes in from an angle, spins her and disorients her – and, as quick as he can, locks her into a fierce embrace that’s not just physical in nature. Before, he had been forcing his way through her neural pathways in a not-altogether-elegant – or very kind in the least – manner. Rather like violently kicking down a door and charging right through several walls in order to reach your intended destination, really. Here, he’s being a lot more... well, subtle isn’t exactly the word. He’s doing the mental equivalent of gently but firmly restraining her from movement; cushioning her and pressing her down from all sides. She – well, not so much  _ she  _ as the entity blanketing her consciousness, because apparently it has far more psychic aptitude than she does – squirms and curses at him and shakes at the bonds like it’s rattling at the bars of a cage. But she and it and the they that the two of them make up as the one entity that they are – they’re restrained. They can’t move. That’s the easy part.

And now for the tricky bit, the part that’s going to require a bit of clever manoeuvring and manipulation.

Underneath it all, she is still her – intrinsically so. And he knows that she is, on some level, aware of all the inherent contradictions in her current state of mind; she’s too smart not to be. You can’t have  _ love  _ while still thinking  _ kill kill kill  _ and having all shades of hatred mixed in there, too. The cognitive dissonance here is no doubt being brushed aside by all the adrenaline and immediacy of her current situation. The trick here is getting her to think past all of that, and recognize how wrong it all is.

“Bernice,” he says, both out loud and internally. “ _ Benny.  _ I need you here and with me, now.”

She’s not listening. Or rather, she is listening, but she’s still her-and-the-creature all tangled into one.

He takes a deep breath, and summons his most biting, condescending tone. “Oh, come  _ on,  _ Professor Summerfield!” he spits at her. “You can’t possibly let something as insubstantial and, quite frankly, as  _ pathetic _ as  _ this  _ creature beat you. Where’s your determination gone? I thought you were stronger than this!”

A challenge, surprisingly, is all that it takes.

Or maybe it’s not so surprising at all, because Irving has never known Benny to back away from a challenge. This is how Irving Braxiatel changes the rules. It’s no longer Benny fighting a battle against him, which he will inevitably lose because of who she is and what she can do. Now, she’s fighting a battle against  _ it _ , against herself; twisting a sentient parasite and uprooting it from the depths of her own mind. And he knows for a fact that she’s not going to lose.

_ What?  _ he hears her think, somewhat distantly, and then,  **_what?!_ ** – with such vicious anger that he almost finds himself compelled to let her go – but he doesn’t, because this rage isn’t directed at him anymore. And then he feels her get shakily to her feet, metaphorically and metaphysically speaking, and take a very deep mental breath, and then she extends her equally metaphorical and metaphysical fingers outwards and starts tearing the twisted weave of the assassin-parasites thoughts and intentions away from her own. He can see, or maybe sense, how painful it is for her. It certainly would be difficult to miss the truly astounding amount and quality of curses and swearing that’s bouncing off the inside of her head as her mind blisters and burns while she tries to separate her and her unwanted guest.

Irving waits and watches and worries, but all things considered, she seems to be doing a fine job on her own. All it took was a slight push, really – now that the boulder’s been set rolling in this new direction, Bernice Summerfield can’t be stopped.

She prises off the last remains of the parasite, ripping them away from her. If this situation were to be depicted on a less conceptual and more visual level, it would probably look a bit like rocky vast terrain, formatted more or less like a slightly out-of-control archaeology dig site. In the middle of this vast dig site, a short middle-aged woman with messy dark hair and an utterly determined, furious look in her eyes stands, glaring at a formless dark entity which is struggling to piece itself together. It builds itself into a proper physical form – a long-limbed shambling creature with vaguely humanoid features that are all almost entirely, but not quite, exactly where they really shouldn’t be. Some distance away, a taller man with a (of course) impeccably tailored suit and his hands in his pockets watches with an unwavering gaze.

_ Right,  _ says Bernice, swiping her hair back from her eyes,  _ right. I’ve had just about enough of you. So, to quote Shakespeare, or to quote someone who was quoting Shakespeare at the time, or something – come on and have a go if you think you’re hard enough. _

It rushes her. She just plants her feet firmly in the loamy soil as the parasite rushes towards her, limbs akimbo and features twisted with fury. It collides with her, but she is first an immovable object, then an unstoppable force. She digs her nails into its flesh, and twists, and then starts walking forwards, pushing it along with her – at first slowly, but then picking up the pace. She shoves and pummels it roughly along until they’re right in front of a door that wasn’t there moments ago.

_ But,  _ it says,  _ no, wait, you can’t –  _ it’s babbling,

_ I really, really can,  _ she retorts, and kicks the door open with one free foot, revealing the swirling abyss of reality outside.  _ Get out of my fucking head,  _ she says, and heaves it forward with one almighty shove. It screams as it goes, trailing black ribbons of malice and trying desperately to grasp at the door frame. Benny just snarls at it, and slams the door on its spindly fingers, before letting out a small  _ ha!  _ of triumph.

Under slightly less urgent circumstances, Irving would have absolutely taken the opportunity to give this impressive display the unironic round of applause that it deserved. Unfortunately, these are very urgent circumstances indeed, and he just doesn’t have the time.

He releases her from his mental embrace, throwing himself back into the real world at a speed that makes his head real and his hearts thump unpleasantly in his chest. In his arms, Benny’s eyes snap open, and she pushes away from him, stumbling and swearing. She wheels around, eyes darting wildly.

“The parasite – ” she croaks, already scanning the area. Her voice sounds like she’s been screaming for hours or like she hasn’t spoken in weeks, and it looks like she can barely keep herself upright.

“I know,” he says, aware that he probably doesn’t look much better. They can’t keep going like this for very much longer. This has to end, and soon.

He catches a glimpse of a color that doesn’t exist from out of the corner of his eye, and spins. A wraithlike being, barely visible to the naked eye and certainly not to the human one, is streaking around the edges of the room at astonishing speeds, and there’s only one thing that it can be. As soon as it sees that it’s got his attention, it coils up and speeds right at him. Of course it does – he’s the only acceptable target, now that Bernice is effectively out of bounds.

“Hey – ” Benny begins, no doubt noticing how he’s tensed himself for impact, but if she says any more, he doesn’t catch a word of it, because it’s at that very moment that it hits him like a train. Or, more accurately, it hits him like a train going neatly into the tunnel it was headed directly for, because he had been expecting this from the beginning. Quick as anything, he slams the door on his mind – similarly to how Benny had done only second ago, except this time, he’s not trying to lock the being out. He’s trying to trap it, and trapped it is – trapped like a fly in amber inside the confines of his head.

For a second or two, he turns it over – examining it from all angles. He can feel the scowl emerging over his face. It’s not worth his time. It’s not even difficult to contain. Compared to Pandora, the parasite known as Mirage is quite literally  _ nothing.  _ All it does is ramp up the emotions and feelings of whoever it’s chosen as its host, which is more of a parlor trick than anything else. And oh, what havoc and misery parlor tricks can end up causing – but, no. It’s beneath him on every conceivable level.

He doesn’t even dignify it with last words, let alone the conversation that it’s so desperate to strike up with him. He just crushes it in one sharp, swift movement. Like bringing a boot down on top of a particularly irksome insect, or reducing a grape to mush and skin in your hand. One second there, and the next gone – erased from existence, never to harm a living being ever again.

He’s almost surprised at the amount of vindictive pleasure he feels in this simple movement – although he shouldn’t be.

He really, really shouldn’t be.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey, you,” she says.

Irving opens his eyes to see Bernice bracing herself against the outer rim of the arena, staring at him with barely concealed anxiety and panic written all across her face.

“Gone,” he says, and lets his shoulders sag. He feels blood on his face, and drags a sleeve across it in order to stem it somewhat. “It’s gone.” He can’t help the amount of relief that he allows to color his voice, because... well. He really is quite relieved, to put it lightly. “We did it.”

“Let me see,” she says, and stumbles towards him. He catches her hands, or she catches his, and they end up kind of falling against each other, foreheads pressing together, and there’s a brief moment where the two of them just  _ are.  _ He sees her, and she sees him, and they can both see that both of them are entirely who they should be.

She breathes in, and lets out a tiny  _ oh  _ of relief, before saying, “we did it,” and sliding down to the ground, legs tangling beneath her bonelessly. Irving follows her down – not just because he’s still holding her hands and doesn’t want her to crack her head on the ground or something equally ridiculous, but because sitting down seems like a really, really good idea at this point. And now they’re sitting on the ground facing each other, and she drops his hands.

She laughs humourlessly, raises a hand up into the air in a silent arm-pump of victory, and promptly flops backwards onto the grimy cold stone floor. After a second of deliberation, he does the same. His clothes are wrecked enough as it is – a little more grime is practically nothing at this point.

Silence.

His ears are ringing from the deafening quiet. The spot of light at the very height of the ceiling is so distant, but it’s bright enough to be impossible to make out what’s beyond it. Street lights, most likely. Legion doesn’t have a sun.

Lying next to him, Bernice breathes in, a quick intake of breath to preface whatever she’s going to say next.

“Hey, you,” she says. The greeting is delicious in its simplicity. She turns her head sideways to look at him, and he turns his head too. They look at each other for a moment, then she graces him with an exhausted sort of smile. She looks as if she’s just realized that she might possibly be on the verge of tears, and is currently valiantly trying to hold them back to retain some semblance of dignity. Irving chooses not to voice this aloud.

“Hello to you too,” he says instead. “You’re feeling more like yourself now, I take it?”

She takes a second or so to contemplate this. “Well, I don’t want to kill you anymore, so – yes, roughly speaking, I’d say so. How about you?”

“I’m not feeling any more or less suicidal than I usually do,” he replies, dry as he can make it – an attempt to restore things back to their usual level of spirited back-and-forth. He’s not sure how successful it is. “Which tends to be a positive sign, or so I hear.”

“Good.” She rolls her head back so she’s looking upward, winces, and says, quite plaintively, “ow.”

“Ow,” he agrees.

She breathes in and breathes out, and so does he, and for a minute or two they just lie there – breathing together, and staring upwards at the faint spot of light from the streets, high above them.

“You broke my arm,” she says after a moment.

“...you have my most sincere apologies for that,” Irving says, and really does mean it. “However –”

She huffs out a sigh that’s too tired to be a laugh. “Oh, here we go.”

“ – it really must be pointed out that you  _ did  _ break my nose first.”

“I did?” He looks over, and sees her blink in confusion. “I – oh. That’s...  _ wow. _ Sorry.”

“You  _ have  _ expressed a desire to do it in the past,” Irving recalls, “so I suppose I can’t fault you for taking the opportunity to finally put this desire of yours into action –”

She makes a tiny noise of distress that makes him stop in his tracks, and he refuses to look at her for a moment or so, because there’s the minute possibility that she may just have started crying, and that’s something that he really doesn’t need or want to see. And he’s nearly certain that if she is, she doesn’t want him to see it, either. After a second, though, he scoots inelegantly towards her and extends an arm in her direction. They curl into each other – all hard angles and rough edges, the both of them – exhausted and dirty and thoroughly worn-out. Her hand curls around his back, and his around the back of her head. They breathe together again for another few minutes. There’s an odd sort of peace to it, although they really could have picked a better spot for it.

“Peter will be worrying,” Benny says into his rumpled, creased, inextricably ruined shirt. She snorts a little. “Hell, all of them will be worrying, won’t they? Bet you anything the three of them worked it out ages ago.”

“Jack, working out something before me?” Irving says, genuinely offended. “I should sincerely hope not.”

She doesn’t say anything, although she does let out a shaky approximation of a laugh. He feels her allow herself another few seconds of this quiet, still moment, before she rolls away from him and she’s all business again. He sits up too, and brushes some of the dust and dirt off his sleeves, knowing that it’s doing precisely nothing at all to get it clean.

He knows that they’re not going to talk about this quiet moment, later. He takes it, wraps it in silk, places it carefully in a small box in the back of his mind dedicated to memories that he cherishes despite the strange and horrible circumstances they were created in, and sets that box gently to one side to examine later.

“We need to get that key back,” Benny says. She pushes herself to her feet using her one non-injured arm as leverage, wincing. She looks in the direction of the drain she had thrown said key into approximately half an hour previously, and then says, “my trowel – we can pry it open; can you-?”

He gets up slowly and painfully, and takes the proffered tool, before setting to work on retrieving the key. It takes some time and careful manoeuvring and quite a lot of exhausted sniping at each other’s ability to complete the simple task, but eventually Irving manages to prise up the ancient-looking grate and pluck the key from the layers of century’s worth of dirt.

And then they get out of there as quickly as they can, because neither of them wants to spend any more time than is absolutely necessary in the arena, now matter how historically and archaeologically fascinating it may be. Getting through the corridors and back to where they started is easy enough – although they’re both more-or-less leaning on each other in an attempt to keep upright the entire way – but as soon as they reach the rickety steel ladder that leads up to the surface, it becomes quite apparent that there is a problem.

“I can’t climb this,” says Benny in dismay, indicating her broken arm.

Thankfully, it’s at more-or-less this precise moment – or a few seconds later, at the very least – that an opportune deus-ex-machina presents itself in the form of a loud clattering and banging noise from above, followed by a distant growl of fury. Finally, the manhole cover far above is unceremoniously ripped away, revealing the distant forms of Jack, Ruth, and Peter

“Irving! You’ve got to get away from Benny!” Peter yells.

“It’s the assassin!” Ruth contributes, a very clear note of panic in her voice. “She’s –”

“Yes, I  _ had  _ gathered,” Irving calls back with admirable restraint, pressing one hand to his now-crooked nose. “And it’s all been dealt with.”

“You’re a bit late,” Benny adds. “Do you think maybe next time you could try yelling out  _ less  _ cryptic warnings at him that make it perfectly, one hundred percent crystal clear that  _ you’re  _ not the one who’s trying to hunt him down and murder him?”

There’s a slightly awkward silence.

“Oh,  _ good, _ ” Jack says. “I  _ do  _ love dashing down the streets of Legion in a full-out panic, trying to prevent what I assumed was going to be a bloody one-man massacre, only to find out that my presence was entirely unneeded. It’s my favorite activity at this ungodly hour of the evening!”

“Well, it’s not  _ entirely  _ unneeded,” Irving admits. “Bernice seems to have broken her arm, making it somewhat difficult for us to get out of this... well –”

“This dark, deep, depressing hole we’re both in,” contributes Benny. “Also, it hurts. A lot. So, if you could work out a way to get me up...?”

The three of them withdraw to share a quick discussion among themselves, and a moment later Jack comes shimmying down the ladder at ridiculously fast speeds. He reaches the bottom, takes in the two of them, and says, “You look like shit.”

“Cheerfully blunt as always, Jack,” Irving sighs.

He shoots her a toothy grin, then goes to look over Benny properly. He pokes and prods at her arm, making a variety of  _ hmm _ s and  _ oh _ s (while she huffs and swears quietly at him), and then nods. The smile slips off his face a little bit. “Definitely broken, yep.”

“That bit was never really in doubt,” Benny says, although there’s not much actual bite to it. She looks too tired to properly commit to the sarcasm.

He peers down at her with genuine concern for a second, and then shrugs. “All right. Only one thing for it, then. Try not to wriggle around too much or I’ll hit the walls, and honestly? That’d probably be  _ pretty _ unpleasant for the both of us.”

“Oh, come  _ on _ ,” she mutters, but still (albeit reluctantly) lets Jack scoop her up into a semi-bridal carry which is more vertically-angled than it probably should be. He shuffles back and forth for a few seconds, trying to get the angle right, and then he bends his knees, and practically rockets straight upwards – entirely living up to his last name. It’s a testament to just how exhausted Benny is that she doesn’t even scream as it happens.

From far away, there is the distant sound of Jack touching down on the solid ground above with a  _ thunk _ , and a little  _ oof  _ from Benny as she’s (presumably) set down on her feet.

“And I suppose you’re just going to leave me down here to climb all the way back up myself?” says Irving from the floor of the underground tunnels, completely unamused.

Jack’s head reappears in the gap. “It’s not as if it’s  _ difficult.  _ I’m sure even old woman Summerfield here could manage it, if her arm didn’t look like someone had crushed it under a pile of bricks.”

“Oi!” comes the distant objection from somewhere out of sight.

“Be that as it may,” Irving says. “I  _ am  _ rather tired, Jack. And I’d really rather get this all sorted now, rather than later. So if you would-?”

“You could be climbing now,” Jack says in a manner that indicates that he’s currently rolling his eyes quite forcefully. “You could be out of there already, I reckon, if you weren’t complaining so much about it.” But nonetheless, he descends into the shaft with one quick bound, and soon enough Irving’s back on the main street, brushing dust and gravel off his (by now) completely ruined suit.

Peter is scanning Benny with some sort of handheld device that he appears to have been carrying all this time. He’s checking them against his wrist device and frowning, one hand on his gun.

“That wouldn’t do anything, even if she were still the assassin,” Irving says. “Believe it or not, the assassin wasn’t a shapeshifter after all – rather, some kind of psychic parasite. A very nasty customer indeed.”

Peter freezes, glares at his handheld device momentarily, and then looks up at Irving. “Wait, how do we know that you’re not the assassin, and you’re just trying to throw us off?”

Bernice laughs, dull and toneless. “How convoluted would that have to be, huh?”

Ruth’s got an arm to her hand, steadying her, and looks almost physically sick with concern and worry. “He’s got a point,” she says, biting her lip. “We can’t really be sure of anything at this point – especially since they’ve definitely proven by now that they’re much, much smarter than we are. I mean, I actually thought it was Jack up until this morning.”

Ignoring Jack’s offended little  _ hey _ and Ruth’s  _ well, you were acting weird about the mimosas, I thought it was another poison-y thing,  _ Irving just turns to Peter, extending his wrist and offering up his tracking device. “Check mine,” he says. “I haven’t taken it off since you gave it to me. I doubt it’ll show many odd changes at all apart from a few physiological spikes from a few hours ago. And if you corroborate with Bernice’s – I suspect you’ll see that, as of fifteen minutes ago, her neurological structure will have shifted. Not dramatically, but I’d bet anything that there’s a definite change.”

“It got into me before you got the news,” Benny contributes. She looks almost ashamed, even though there’s no real logical reason for her to look that way – it wasn’t as if it was her fault. “That’s why you wouldn’t have seen any change in my readings – my modified readings were already set as the baseline.”

Peter runs the scanner over their wrist devices, and reads over them for a moment or two, before nodding slowly. “That all checks out. And I don’t know why you’d have any reason to lie about all this, so...”

“Unless there’s actually two shapeshifters,” Jack suggests.

Ruth hits him. “ _ Jack.  _ We don’t need this right now.”

“What? I’m just saying – there’s a distinct possibility – I’m just covering all our bases!”

“There’s not,” Irving says. Apparently he sounds certain enough and final enough about this that nobody argues.

Peter finishes up some final scans, and nods, reluctantly. “I’m going to have to run some more scans, after this,” he says. “Full-body, probably. Just to make sure – you know.”

“Yeah. That’s probably for the best,” Benny says.

“Back to the White Rabbit?” Ruth suggests.

“Please,” agrees Irving, and off they go in a sort of barely-standing-upright huddle, everybody crowded around Irving and Benny protectively.

The bar is cold and empty when they arrive, but Jack gets to work on starting up the generators and heaters and Ruth gently bullies Bernice and Irving into sitting down and drinking watery, scalding-hot tea, and Peter comes back from the back room with shock blankets that neither of them actually need but neither of them decline.

Fixing up Benny’s arm and Irving’s nose is easy enough, although the sling that Benny apparently has to wear for the next week or so, so as not to injure it further, is somewhat improvised and less than flattering. Deciding what to do after that is less easy. It’s late enough that the logical thing to do would be for everyone to go home and get some rest, but nobody wants to do that – although they don’t say as much out loud. Leaving each others’ presence seems somehow completely unthinkable, but at the same time – nobody knows what to do.

They finish their drinks, and then sit in silence. Ruth hovers over Benny like a shadow, Peter seems torn between voicing some sort of concern and remaining entirely silent like the stoic awkward teenage boy he is.

Irving stands up. Everybody startles, lightly, but he’s already going over across the room to the piano, which nobody had gotten the chance to cover up since last week. He sits down on the piano bench and lightly places his hands on the keys, not pressing down. He rests his forehead against the wood of it and sighs. After a moment, Ruth comes over and sits down on the ground, back pressed up against the wood of the piano’s side and closes her eyes. She tugs her knees up to her chest. Jack is next, hoisting himself up to sit cross-legged on top of the piano itself. For a moment, Irving is worried that it won’t support his weight but, of course, Jack is deceptively light. Peter comes over too, dragging a barstool and taking up residence on the other side of the piano, closest to the window.

Finally, Benny takes a seat right next to Irving. She holds herself carefully, like she’s afraid of accidentally breaking the piano, or Irving, or herself. Irving looks over at her, and really doesn’t know what to say in the least. It’s not as if he has anything to apologize for – really,  _ she  _ should be the one apologizing, although he doesn’t want her to do that, either – but he feels almost as if he should, nonetheless.

Instead of speaking, he breathes out slowly, and starts to play. A simple melody. Nothing especially remarkable or interesting at all – just sequences of notes, produced for the simple satisfaction of bringing melodies to completion and hitting all of them as accurately and rhythmically as he possibly can. It’s not impressive at all, but everybody’s listening to him intently, as if he’s the only thing left in the universe, so he just keeps on playing.

The melody evolves, shifts; and he finds himself sliding through nostalgic muscle-memory songs. Old Gallifreyan melodies – half-remembered and just about as dull as the rest of their society – move smoothly into the overture from a nineteenth-century German opera that nobody cares about. From there, it’s the melody from an Advent carol on top of the slow moving chords of  _ Tam Lin, _ and then a slow but brief rendition of a song he knows Benny would prefer be left to the ruins of time, and then songs that don’t exist yet on top of  _ Chopsticks,  _ and then Benny’s humming  _ This Old Heart Of Mine _ , and he can’t do anything but oblige her as he starts to play along.

Tomorrow, they’ll have to deal with the consequences of all this – work through side-effects of Benny’s possession, make sure it can never happen again, start on the process of figuring out who ordered the assassination attempt in the first place so they can be stopped, too – but for now, there’s none of that. Right now, there’s just the five of them gathered tightly around a piano in the corner of an empty bar, listening to Irving play and Benny hum and all the other noise from outside and around them almost retreat away entirely, in deference to this simple, quiet duet.


End file.
